Birth of the Sky
by slexenskee
Summary: Sakura's patient, Uzumaki Naruto, was ambigous as the sky itself. An elusive S-class ex-ANBU whom she only previously knew from his bingo book biography; muderer of the Yondaime, ex-Konoha blackops, and current vagabond.
1. Passion Pit's the reeling

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction ( If I wanted to write cannon I would have called it, "The manga Naruto in writing. Fucking christ). If you have a problem with Naruto having a different personality then his usual moronic self, FIGHT ME.

(Honestly, why don't people get this is fiction? Its not supposed to be strict cannon)

- - -

There was some sort of deep poetic injustice in the way Suna's blistering sun cowed the desert life into an uneasy, restless submission against the dunes wavering lines.

Naruto laid amongst the scratching freckles of sand, the embodiment of wasted youth. Or perhaps it is this artless quality that brings his appeal.

Even against dazed, red-rimmed eyes mirroring the sky above him, he retains it, lost in the waves of acid that circulates from his twitching fingertips and parts his lips, downward curving and met with thin triplet lines against sun speckled cheeks. Ephemeral youth burning like Indian Summer against his flesh-burning red-hot cheeks, flowing in the smoky irises that swirl with a world that can only be seen in the beholder. Twenty five, in retrospect, has very little grace in the clambering act of hormone-ridden ruination-seeking adolescents in their quest to the peaks of adulthood.

Youth, a destructive cycle lost upon the young.

- -

The sky domes above him, a sea of clouds round a blinding sun, meandering past like a dew-fresh field laden with cattle, mother's licking their young who frolic in the prospect of long blades of grass dancing in the morning breeze, slow aged parents watch their young with tired eyes, feet carrying them at snail-pace to their destination.

Naruto can see their faces clearly, drawn and worn from the weary travels in the sky, wispy tendrils of fur warped in the passing winds, pulling and stretching, and contorting into ashen fragments in the refracted light.

Another whipped pull and the faces morphed draping into a brilliant Monet garden series beautiful patchwork of colors Naruto wouldn't be able to described if given another chance to get this high, let alone put the visionary frame into words.

Amidst the swirl of colors, he can forget where he is, back, back, back, _trapped_.

"Uzumaki Naruto?" Quipped Sakura, unintentionally quickly.

Tsunade, for her benefit, does nothing but continue scribbling at rapid-fire pace. "Yes."

Sakura, twenty-five, and at times naïvity still gets the better of her. Questioningly she eyes her mentor, but her steadfast gaze is only met with a fringe of flaxen hair tied loosely. "I don't understand." She decides upon, finally. "Who is he? What's wrong with him?"

Tsunade doesn't meet her eyes, and her words seem to bend around the subject in an obvious avoidance. "Nothings wrong with him," She admits, but there is an unhealthy amount of elusiveness to her answer.

"So why is he being held in Konoha?" Sakura furrowed her brows, Tsunade noted that she had dark lashes that framed the vibrant swirl of colors in her eyes.

"His safety, I suppose you could think."

Lately—and although it wasn't much of an unusual occurrence—Tsunade had been her usual vague self, if not a little more so, but Uzumaki Naruto made her sensei continue speech patterns dodging the obvious questions with obscure half-truth barefaced answers that didn't entirely quell Sakura's questions, nor did it really answer anything.

"There are people after him?"

Tsunade laughed breathlessly, Sakura felt as if Tsunade thought she was talking to a slow, dimwitted child. "No, no. More for safety against himself."

And again, another unclear answer that didn't answer the question at all. Why would he need safety against?

"Well, Shishou," She interrupted her mentors quiet, almost sobbing sounding chuckles. "If he's going to be my patient I would like to know exactly who he is, and what his background is." She flitted through the files in her hand. "These answers aren't filled in at all! And the ones that are; recent health care, 'self medicated'. Affiliations, 'ramen." Sakura scowled. "You can't have affiliations to _food." _

If anything, Tsunade only laughed harder.

"If this is a joke..." Sakura hissed, sotto voce, indignation grounded as she clenched her fists.

"Oh," And the laughing quelled, flaking off into seriousness. "This is no joke. Uzumaki Naruto's name _should _be on the memorial of heroes...no. It should have its _own _stone. A man like that only deserves the best."

"I don't—I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't have clearance...I didn't complete the course, and my training—"

"I trust you." While her words were truthful, Sakura could sense something behind her words. Something...

Successfully quieted, Sakura merely opted to watch serenity strum across the Hokage's face liken melodies across a harp, slow but surely, contours blending into melodic harmonies until every string hummed in vibration.

"I understand." Softly, her voice mimicked her Sensei's tranquility. "I'll do my best."

- -

Shikamaru eyed the blond who had been missing from his life for a near six years.

Uzumaki Naruto had never been much of a serious guy. As a Jounin in his teens, another fellow young ninja was always welcomed among the midst of oldies like Asuma who eyed the world the way battered scarecrows eye their crops, a mixture of vague annoyance and seriousness. Uzumaki Naruto was the opposite. While his prenatally loud nature was at best annoying, and his mulish qualities were far from endearing, the incredible genius behind his smile was what attracted Shikamaru to him in the first place.

Countless missions had Naruto's brilliance shown through thee clout of arrogance he held against himself, a true testimony to prodigy shinobi. Whilst Shikamaru and his peers snail-paced through their academy and Gennin days, Uzumaki had completed his Chuunin training, before, inevitably reaching Jounin and ANBU, where Shikamaru had met him.

Seeing him now, six years later was as much of a wake up call to Shikamaru as his mother's blaring voice on a silent Sunday morning.

The life of a Shinobi was short, bitter, and ended in sorrow.

Uzumaki Naruto was testimony to that.

"Gimme a shot of Bombay Sapphire." His fist made the drinks around the bar rattle.

The bartender, who, had been turned filling up a Long Island for a pretty lady with a gummy pink smile, turned with more than a bit annoyance to the blathering severely-inebriated blonde.

"Excuse my friend," Shikamaru cut in lazily, before Naruto got himself into trouble. "He's had too much—

"I have _not_" Naruto irritatedly interrupted.

"Look," The bartender sized him up warily, trying to find his body to alcohol ratio. "That's more than enough—"

"Who are you, my mother? Give me some more." He slurred, before chuckling, muttering something about rhymes, which Shikamaru noted meant that he was so drunk he didn't notice that his words didn't rhyme...at all.

Obviously not going to get into a fight with shinobi—no matter how drunk the ninja may be—the bartender eyed him while pouring his drink.

"You're gonna die, kid." Was his fare warning, sauntering back to the wine-haired maiden with glossy red lips and a little black dress.

Straight Bombay Gin was something that Shikamaru would have persuaded Naruto not to drink some six or seven years ago, but now, he feared his warnings would fall in relatively deaf ears.

"You _are_ going to die." The other ninja pulled Naruto off his stool in a fluid motion, ignoring the squawk of protest and pushing him out the doors and into the summer crisped night, buzzing with dry heat.

"'m not." The blond muttered as he met the warm tinge of summer air. "Can't."

Shikamaru, vaguely, somewhere behind his natural curiosity and remote annoyance, wondered what went wrong.

"Why'd you come back, Naruto?"

"Didn't have a choice." The blond growled crossly. And just as suddenly, did Naruto pull himself up from his slouch and open wide-blue and definitely not inebriated eyes into the dark night, and the warped serious mindscape that accompanied being sober.

Shikamaru blinked, chalking up his flash from drunken stupor to complete sober behavior to the fact that the fox must have pulled the alcohol out of his system.

"I thought you didn't want to come back." A statement, not a question.

"I didn't." The Jinchuuriki walked forward, with the confident gait of an impressive ninja, not the drunken dance he should have, and then a breathless grouch about the fox's healing abilities working too quickly. "I was just goin' around the world, enjoying myself and trying out the local dining, and Tsunade pulls me back here cause apparently I'm a wayward dog who needs training of my ways."

The anger in his voice is just as apparent as the resignation.

"You're certainly strong enough to avoid Konoha if you genuinely wanted to." Said the brunette.

Silhouetted by the blinding lights of the flickering lamp, edges brightened, Shikamaru was sorely reminded of the Fourth, who had given the boy in front of him his coloring, winterwheat hair and big china-blue eyes, skills and ability. What would the Yondaime say of his only son, now? A man with accomplishments so great it rivaled his father's legacy, with a tasteful eye for literature and a drastically less tasteful eye for life styles.

"I don't know what to do with my life." Intense-eyed, stone-faced. "I have no purpose."

Be it the somber mood from crashing from whatever drug he was high on or the fact that Kyuubi had ripped away his blissful stupor, or the rigged ANBU training and weapon-like lifestyle Naruto had lived in for nineteen years of his life, the words pulled something from the blond in front of him, eying the constellations scrupulously.

"What purpose do you expect to find here?" He asked him, ardently.

"Dunno. But, seeing as I've been avoiding this place for six years of my life, you think there'd be something here that I'm missing."

While his logic was faulty, Shikamaru could understand how the thought had become seeded in the soil of his mind. Running away was caused by _something. _

"It's late," Shikamaru eyed his watch that blinked ominously, 2:17. "I have a mission tomorrow."

As he turned away from the stone-still blond who was yet to move, he sighed softly. "Don't be troublesome."

But he doubted his caution would be heeded.

- -

Sakura tapped her pen on the smooth surface of the hospital's provided stainless steel desk. The chair was straight and uncomfortable, and her white coat did nothing with the draft that slithered around the floor. The walls were ominously blank, and Sakura could understand why so many people associated such bad memories to hospitals. But quite honestly, the hospital did nothing to prove itself. White sallow walls trapping patients with their methodical splotches that reeled in your head until finally spots brightened and ate away at the blank world, inducing schizophrenic whispers and the conclusion to rock back and force with border-line insanity.

Uzumaki Naruto had no picture, no background, and very sparse personal data.

Inwardly Sakura scowled. The last thing she needed was a tortured soul who flitted around the room like a meek kitten, pawing at her whenever she arrived late and prone to anxiety attacks, and a mind with faulty workings and altogether a legitimate idiot.

...

Instead, her heart stops beating and her eyes go wide and there's something, _something_, losing her countenance completely, defiant of orchids and orchids alike.

Red-rimmed eyes, but blue, blue, blue, blue like the ocean devouring the sky and so bright they make the wall's go black, sucking her in and wrenching her into a world drenched in a single spectrum of a single color—

Tousled lemon-colored hair glowing gold in the sunlight from a distant window down the corridor, sun speckled cheeks splashed with long contours of peaches and walnuts and light oranges that make up tan skin, his loose gray tee-shirt with crass words form from one mobile shoulder to the lines of his neck for a memorable antiphony to the drab colorless of the room. Behind the frayed ends of loose fabric were the stretched skin over taught muscles, (not a psyche patient, but a ninja, ninja, ninja) and behind the sky blue she could see a claret red that growled to her in soft undertones ("Are you scared, chicken?") her pupils dilating and focusing, unfocused and weary before sharp and clear-cut.

"Hello," What a mesmerizing voice. Soft, strong.

Flustered, heat rising in her cheeks in both pure embarrassment at her unprofessional behavior and the fact that he's _sex on legs, _she fumbles with her papers to find something to do with her hands, not meeting his slightly bemused gaze.

"U-Uzumaki Naruto?" She asked him, hating the way her voice cracks.

"Yeah." Completely chilled and unfazed, or perhaps he hasn't even noticed her rose tinged cheeks. But his bright ocean water eyes are hooded with uncharacteristic intelligence, and Sakura thinks that nothing probably escapes his unfaltering (smoldering, smoldering, smoldering) gaze. "Haruno Sakura, I presume?"

She opened her mouth, but only hot breath comes out, before she closed it.

Again, she floundered with the papers she had methodically straightened...backwards.

He leaned back in the chair opposite of her, suave, rough-rigged face and artless quality only heightening the easy-going laid-back personality he exudes.

"Your forms," She said, as she turned them all upright. "This background...you left it blank."

Blond Adonis—Naruto--shrugged noncommittally. "Didn't think you needed it."

"As your doctor and counselor (when she had completed psychiatric training that allowed her to be a psychiatrist was beyond her, but she mused it must have something to do with Tsunade) it is imperative that I am forwarded all your past and present medical records." Her voice, luckily, quells its trembling and her outward appearance is strictly professional.

"What do you want to know?" While his voice betrayed nothing but relaxed confidence, it was his empathetic eyes that revealed the careful tact behind his words.

"Are you a Konoha citizen?"

"Yes."

The scribbles of pen on thin paper, grating into the steel below. "Are you a Konoha shinobi?"

Narrow, smoldering blue. "No."

Sakura frowned softly. And rephrased it as, "_Were _you ever a Konoha shinobi?"

There.

A slight movement of dilated pupils, one flash of raised irises, a glossy, restless movement within a sea, a world, of blue.

"Yes," Stiff, part defensive part resignation.

She finely writes down these small—minuscule really. While she never fully completed her psychology courses she knew that there should be more signals, more clear, then what he showed—gestures with a watchful eye on her patient's slow, but perhaps deliberate, movements.

"Rank?" She asked with some amount of tact.

"ANBU."

"Age of resignation?"

"Nineteen." His answer kept to the fast-paced methodical rhythm that Sakura had set, a maneuver used to get the patient into a rhythm in order to trigger the subconscious to answer truthfully.

Her surprise was concealed past her fresco hair that slid from behind her ear and swished like a cat's tail in front of her face. Bright ultramine eyes above sun-flecked cheeks watch the now motionless length of hair.

She looked up, face carefully devoid of emotion. "Reasoning?"

Sakura pressed herself against the back of the uncomfortable chair as if they were a married couple in love, scorned from years apart becoming one again at a tearful reunion.

Fact: The chair is as dolorous as leaning on a rose bush pin-prickled with one thousand thorns facing the direction of the smooth contours of her back, and even with the buffering of a thin doctor's coat, the awkward steel material presses vexatiously against the small of her back.

Sakura leaned her head back as far as her lily white swan neck allowed, because the sharp snapping of his eyes startled her until her eyes widened in their sockets and her fingers clenched the rough edge of the arm rests.

She forcefully made herself calm down, she had dealt with mentally unstable patients before, but why had that scared her?

He hadn't done anything but...the piercing of his eyes against her and the way they _clawed at her very soul, _wrenching her fibers apart and tearing like a bloodhound on prey made her meek in his presence, a mortal instinct ingrained into her since birth and flowing within her like primal reflexes, some chord within her that told her _this was no human_.

A flash. Flashing of claret that made her briefly flicker her eyes to his, noting the calm, almost guilty (maybe for scaring her so forcefully?) swirl of his blue eyes.

Imagination; the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.

"Personal." His words were unfocused, but his eyes conveyed something that perhaps resembled an apology.

Prying was out of the question.

"Where were you the last six years?"

"I'm a ramen connoisseur." The way he said it so seriously Sakura wasn't sure if he was being vaguely sarcastic or extremely serious. "I travel the world tasting ramen."

"I see..." She put, not bothering to question the authenticity of his job description.

"Haruno-san," A petite, flaxen young nurse with the comely still-baby-fat cheeks and questioning eyes peered almost adoringly at Naruto's disheveled lemon colored hair. "There is a patient...I'm sorry if I'm interrupting, but Tashikawa-san distressed it was of great importance that you—"

A defeated sigh, and she followed the meek nurse out the door with, before a formal, "I will have to postpone our meeting to a later date. I will see you at your next scheduled appointment." Ending with a customary smile that Naruto couldn't quite place if the words were meant to threaten immense and laborious running from ANBU until he showed, or if she was simply being professional.

Fingering the smooth stainless metal of the chair he sat upon, Naruto watched the sun dive into the horizon with a burst of color.

In Suna he would have loaded himself with as much acid as he could buy, maybe lift a couple hundred ryo off of a local department store, buy himself some more, spend the night tripping, crash in the morning and find himself curiously waterlogged and flattened against a buxom maiden with dark hair and dark eyes. Instead he:

a) dragged his ass over to Konoha

b) spoke to the Hokage about getting his life into some semblance of order, and, most noticeably,

c) hadn't been sober until this hour, hadn't showered in a day and was wearing the same shirt he had spattered blood onto when he beat eight people in a warm up bar fight, and was crashing badly.

And more importantly, no purpose in life.


	2. Bravery's believe

_I love it how obviouslyyyyyyyy if Naruto isn't an idiot then he's a playboy god bedding fox girls and raping sasuke...there's no such possible thing as him not being an idiot and not being a manwhore.

* * *

_

Hyuga Neji sipped his tea quietly in the cobwebbed corner of one of Konoha's nestled-in-an-alley-way kind of tea shops, filled with inordinate amounts of junk, including but not limited to, rusted birdcages, an incredibly in mint condition gingerbread family collection, glass hookahs that lined the dusty shop windows with wide busts, skinny necks, and weird shapes and colors, small wrapped packages of mushrooms, and crystallized flies.

The man behind the counter had a musty seedy look to him, and whilst he made phenomenal green tea, seemed a bit like the old men in the Hyuga household who danced about with their eyes closed and continuously lost their fake teeth and sung songs that didn't make much sense whatsoever.

He hadn't bothered to look up when the bent-up bell precariously perched atop the hinge of the door moaned as it opened.

Many of the folk that traveled into such a store were the shady kind who, if the Uchiha police were still around, would be long since done patrolling about the shadowy street outside to simply park in front of its doors. Naturally, Itachi had cleared Neji of such a problem, and that, was that.

Since the Hyuga in question was too engrossed with his musings and the swirl of his tea he didn't notice the sunshine blonde hair that gleamed the sun that peered from cracks in the bleak roofs of the alleyway.

"Seven grams." His voice was quiet, but, even as Neji hadn't looked up, he could still feel a clear distinction from the hoarse, estranged current of a voice he had heard frequently long ago.

The Hyuga knew it was better to simply ignore the underhanded dealings altogether, then to catch and thus be inclined to tell officials.

It reminds him, deep within the shell that he has clambered into since relieving himself—not do to any input the Hokage, but simply due to the fact that he no longer thought himself mentally stable for weathering such emotional trauma—from his ANBU duty, and returning to Jounin status, of a beautiful boy with the world at his finger tips.

While he had no aptitude to men, he also had no issue describing the boy as something far beyond the handsome charm of any human. Perhaps it was the dulcet undertones that misted about him, shadowing below wide bright eyes, variegated behind the upwards curve of his mouth, accented against the mobile lines of his shoulders, muscle-tense and ready-spring.

Or, was it the auricomous lighting of his hair against deep claret sunsets, crimson liquid sprays against the slightest freckled cheeks, patterns against ANBU uniform, when his eyes no longer held the color stolen from the sky, but of the malignant demon that resided within him, watching him closely with the high coloring his cheeks in flushed colors, with his lips parted as he said, "They're dead now". (these days were long gone now, for Naruto was no naïve child crumpled beneath the exterior of death, they had to have, for he had grown into a man)

And then, translucent eyes snap open, head abruptly facing the dusted door, and the man from his past surreptitiously shoves a hand into his pocket, the other rubbing the gravity-defying spikes of his hair.

Just like that, the replication of the Yondaime walks out of his life, again.

–

Belatedly, around the passion pit, the reeling, that thunders beneath the surface of his burning cheeks, below the breath of _feelingemotion—_life that rushes into his unmoving fingers and through the ragged gasps of air, Naruto realized he had missed his appointment.

The refracted sunset from the lakes surface above him cut and glossed with the waves anxious movements, as if they worried for the boy sunken beneath their currents, watching the world around his high, bubbles streaming to the surface, back into reality. The boy, holding his knees between whorls of twisting and turning water reeds stretching into the watery sky, who should be a man.

But, Konoha held nothing for him, not even with glowing bottle green eyes and full roseate lips and hair like the blush of a flower girl.

--

Sakura sighed as she pushed her way past the crowd in the hospital.

The day had only worsened considerably since its start, descending into a state of constant nose-pinching headache induced pill-popping lifestyle she wished she could say she had never fell into, but new that it was imperative to never lie to herself.

Again, Naruto missed his appointment. He had missed two already, and whilst Sakura knew she should be worried, she couldn't help her relief.

Something about him made her breath dry, and eyes wide, and it was a subconscious movement of her stomach that _lurched _making her uneasy and gripping the cool steel of her desk.

In a very Tsunade-esque way, she pulled the sliding doors open and entered the chamber where an ANBU lay over an array of seals, overlapping to create a mesh of characters that glowed brightly, ending at the pale shaky nervous-laced hands of the other medic nin.

Sakura peered at the unmasked figure closely, regarding the man with an air of a professional medic with no prior attachments to a patient.

Which was a lie.

Shikamaru Nara had been one of her group mates during her Academy, and, for a small amount of time, Gennin days as well. While her, Sasuke, and Sai had been thrown into a team for lack of parental teams, Shikamaru, Ino, and Chouji were near destined to enter into a team together. However, the—or at least she had thought at first—lack luster slothful sofa spud of a shinobi proved himself and shocked their class as he became the first Chuunin of all the graduates, and, months later, became Jounin and ANBU.

What happened to him afterwards was a mystery, as she was too busy completing her training, and before that, chasing Sasuke.

Seeing him now made her realize that he hadn't just faded into the background.

"Nara-san?" She called softly as she pushed her hands to his bleeding abdomen.

He made a grunting noise as he wavered between consciousness and the dips of oblivion.

She didn't bother to speak after that, beginning to use her years of training to push the tendons back together and wrap capillaries and veins with flesh, mending the broken bones and lacerations.

Ultimately, the surgery was a great success, and Shikamaru was in no critical danger. Her chakra levels, however, were a bit of a different story. She'd remember later that she shouldn't overwork herself to keep her mind off of certain elusive patients.

As she sat next to a quiet Shikamaru looking for after-surgery problematic issues, watching his chest rise and fall methodically, once again her peaceful thoughts were interrupted by Naruto.

"Sakura?" Shikamaru hadn't even opened his eyes, but he already seemed too lazy to properly address her.

Due to the fact that they had once been classmates, she let it slide. "Nara-san, you've been in intensive surgery for the last five hours. How are you feeling?"

"Achy."

She smiled mirthlessly. "Thats too be expected. Anywhere particular?"

"Around the abdomen." He said, and with a look at his near comatose right arm, "And my elbow."

Without a word, her pen scratched onto her notes. "The swelling will fade after a couple hours on your arm. You'll begin to feel your hand again afterwards."

"Great."

"What else do you feel?"

Sakura watched his mouth twitch, a sign that he was mulling over a large expanse of thought. As a genius who had become ANBU almost as fast as Kakashi-sensei had, she mused that perhaps this was a normal habit.

"Worried."

Her brows furrowed. "About?" It wasn't a standard medical check-up for mental health, but, she supposed, as a now psychiatrist (according to Tsunade, at least, which was really all that mattered) she could begin some routine questions.

"A friend of mine," He cogitated. "I'm worried for him."

"Oh?" She began to jot down notes. Sometimes ANBU received such grave injuries due to their emotional tottering, a sure sign that it was time to retire the fast-paced profession. "Why is that?"

"He doesn't seem to know what to do with his life." Shikamaru's voice held a mixture of bemusement.

_Sounds like someone I know_, Sakura grossed, bright blue eyes and an intense aura waiting beneath wired muscles pictured itself in her mind.

"Who's your friend?" She inquired, mainly to carry conversation, half-heartedly listening to his answer.

"Goes by Naruto. You probably don't know him, he didn't go to the academy."

Very intentionally slowly, Sakura placed her pen down in an attempt to cover her shock. Carefully, she worded, "Is he a ninja?"

On her files on a certain, 'Uzumaki Naruto' he had listed himself as a shinobi. Perhaps, he was lying.

"Was." He opened his eyes to the bleak white of the room's sky, frowning noncommittally. "A damn good one."

"I see..." She nodded, holding back her careening interest with a press of lithe fingers to the bar of the chair. "ANBU with you?"

"Yes."

"Why did he retire?" She eyed his reaction closely, asking with much tact.

Shikamaru shrugged, and winced at the action. "Don't know. But he was young. I don't think he had many friends outside of the profession, said he was trained specifically for the job, been a black ops since he was fourteen."

Sakura blinked in disturbed interest and shock. "That's terrible."

"I could see why," He sighed, muttering something akin to, "much to good at his job" before turning to her. "Anyway, aren't you supposed to be writing notes on my behavior, not my friend?"

"Well yes." She covered her interest quickly. "But, such conversation over a dear friend of yours concludes that your social aspects are normal." And looking him over quickly, she added, "For such a lazy shinobi as yourself."

Shikamaru chuckled.

"I'll check up on you tomorrow before you check out." With that, she stood, and walked out the door.

From what Shikamaru could remember, Sakura had always been a bit too interested in boys and too unoccupied with her ninja skills. Just like Ino. But at any rate, she was now twenty-one and a bit of a battle ax. There was something odd to be said from such a shallow young child becoming the distant medic walking out his hospital room.

–

The following day, Neji mulled about where exactly such blond enigmatic characters such as Naruto would be, taking his musings in stride as he walked about one of Konoha's less traveled paths.

Naruto had bright, bright blue eyes as if someone had caught the sky between his fingers and tucked them beneath a blond boy's irises, Neji could remember with such distinction the clarity of those eerily glowing eyes, as he stood with the new recruits against a backdrop of bleak and dark gray walls of an ANBU headquarters briefing room.

"_Many of you will lose your lives, not for lack of skill, but simply because you're naïve and trusting, and sometimes just because your newbies and newbies always die on the first run." Taichou had a hoarse voice that sounded like he didn't use it very often, and a face always behind his dog mask, but if Neji could see his it, he'd think to see sunken cheeks and darkened eyes, with a five o'clock shadow and gritty teeth._

_Neji was a new recruit, and was tempted to lean to Shikamaru, the only other ANBU he knew, who stood too casually to his left, hiding behind a deer mask. _

_Instead however, he was entranced by the boy who sat upon the desk behind Taichou._

_His fox mask was in his hand, and he seemed to be much younger than him (what he didn't know what that the boy was simply small for his age) with eyes that glowed demonic-like and trance-like delphinium blue eyes, so bright it was blinding, making the light sallow walls darken, and the pupils brighten. _

_Lemon painted hair covered his forehead, tousled and askew, but he had such a big smile upon his face as he watched the new recruits that Neji felt the need to wonder of his status. He almost seemed to be an...equal to the Captain. Yet, he was strikingly young, much too young to be an ANBU captain (at this he was sorely reminded of Itachi, who was the supposed last child-soldier)_

_While the briefing whisked past his ears in dull wisps of a scratch-thatched voice, he stood stone-still as the blue eyes that burned into his retina turned to _him, _and god watched him beneath those lowered lashes, the child-like features distorting into the crazed demigod that lurked under the surface, a rath that boiled beneath his golden skin and the spray of freckles below his eyes, jaws wrenching the sky apart and inhuman screams torn from shattering a spectrum and then._

_Naruto's eyes turned away to Shikamaru._

_The other new ANBU clambered away, in a very tail-between-legs movement, while Shikamaru turned to walk with the boy who hopped off the table._

_As they began to speak, Neji caught one last glimpse of the near ultra-violet bright eyes, before they disappeared behind the shadows of a white mask._

By the end of the night, Neji ended his career as a black-ops, the boy who's name he learned to be Naruto saved his life eight times, he watched sixty three people die, including people he knew, and vowed to never become and ANBU again.

The Naruto he had seen exiting the shady dealer's store, pocketing Schedule I drugs and a lit joint between his lips, toned shoulders and the stone face of the Yondaime scuplted where once the boyish faye looks of a child once were, claret red eyes and straw colored hair that had the air of a man who naturally had styled hair, ruffled from sleep and nonexistent combing, was not the same child from his memories. But still he retained the cryptic, oracular movements of what could only be described as a true shinobi.

Neji walked past the lake, so deep in his thoughts he almost didn't stop to question the water-logged spikes that were strewn on the dock's surface.

Immediately remembering the jagged striped cheeks—the only thing that was a clear depiction of Naruto's prior life—he briskly ventured towards the soaked form.

The Yondaime lay against sea-wooded banks, breathing heavily and cheeks burning, russet lips ragged and closed eyes probably red rimmed, until Neji keenly remembered that this was not the Yondaime (even when the face betrayed that) but Naruto, his captain, the one who pulled him from his death bed six years ago, who killed forty-eight people—he counted, every time he dreamed he always counted—in front of him, battered and blood soaked, eyes shining crimson and face savage.

"Naruto."

What happened, he wondered? Naruto's abrupt resignation, and afterward, resignation from the shinobi world in general, was nothing short of utmost secrecy. Almost as quieted as his existence was. Neji hadn't even realized Naruto was alive until that fateful day.

Even now, the respect in his voice was noticeable and grave.

Naruto stirred, fingers unclenching and the bloody marks on his hands healing near instantly.

Unlike Shikamaru, who had known Naruto on a personal level, Neji only knew the sparse facts that were allowed to the Shinobi populace, and what he had encountered first hand. One of these abilities being his uncannily quick—the more Neji thought about it, the more he realized it was downright _inhuman—_healing...and the fiendish, satanic glowing corpse-blood eyes, and bright personality even amidst his destructive cycle of life, and the latest fact he'd learned, his catalysmic lifestyle bordering near suicidal.

But then, living such a pernicious existence for such a strained period of time would always have its side affects.

"Hyuga?" He groaned, and bloodshot blue awakened to the world.

The sun died behind the Hyuga's wisps of dark hair, eyes burning into his soul.

"Lysergic acid diethylamide is illegal in the four major countries as it is in twelve minor countries, Konohagakure being one of them." His impassive, sotto vace performance of the 'intervention' man was standing ovation worth.

"Why?" He blond demigod whom Neji had striven to be in his entire shinobi career questioned forlornly. "Am I in Konoha?"

Neji deemed deadpan silence the most worthy adversary to Naruto's very couth rebuttal.

"Ahh, shit." Finally, he groaned.

"Do you have any place you need to be?" Languidly, he leaned back to allow Naruto space to wobbly stand.

"Uh," He quipped, very intelligently.

Neji narrowed his eyes. "If not, the police would be delighted to wipe another addict off the streets—"

"Go ahead and bring me downtown," He rolled his eyes at his once subordinate. "The drug's already out of my system. My test's will be clean."

Obscure images of the gaping whole, blood pooling beneath sandals and dripping out from where the most _important _organ of the human body once was, a beating heart twisted outside of a broken cage of bone, Naruto staring despondently before placing it in the broken bone structure, before he pushed it back in and the rest of his body fluttered to life with the wingbeat-fast crunch of his heart pumping blood—

Neji shook his head. He didn't doubt the truth in the blond's words.

"And anyways," He began again with an unconcerned lopsided smile, while he walked ahead of the questioning Hyuga. "I think I missed an appointment."

–

Sakura watched splatters of droplets spit from the sky in a deep-quiet pitter patter against her window panes.

Naruto was late.

Tapping her pen against the smooth steel of her desk, she imagined that she shouldn't be so surprised. She depicted such an indecipherable character such as Naruto to not once show up on time, an elusive spirit she combined very greatly wither her depiction of her sensei Kakashi. Naruto perhaps, even more so then Kakashi-sensei. And if there was one thing that she had learned from Kakashi, was that

a) shinobi with watery pasts like once-ANBU usually talked very little about themselves

b) ex-black ops always, always, _always _lie, even about inconsequential things like sleeping in

c) she should never underestimate a shinobi because of his quirky habits, because usually it meant they were stronger than average

and most importantly, patience was the best virtue when dealing with such people.

He had missed two appointments before, and Sakura had brushed it off to the fact he cared very little about these discussions (something that could be considered an hour of Sakura talking to a near mono-symbolic brick wall) and about Konoha in general. What they had did to him in the past was something she hoped to discover through one of their "talks".

She broke her musings to watch a lily petal flutter onto the bare of her desk.

A vivid contrast to the bland, steel desk, steel chair, and white walls, and gray leather couch on which patients sit. In other words, standard hospital unit's furnishing, and she wasn't there enough to change it. However, the bouquet of flowers left by one of her patients brightened the room considerably.

Sighing, she looked down to jot more notes and finish files.

"Like the flowers."

Her head shot up.

The door slid open and Adonis walked into her office, damp hair dripping rain on her immaculate floors.

Naruto plopped into the couch, plush pillows enveloping the wiry muscles of his frame, as she took notice of the beaten black trainers he wore and the ripped shirt with claw marks looking as if a beast had tore his heart out, stretched over the beginning of his jeans.

She shook her head in a non-embarrassed fashion (she wasn't, of course) and began icily. "Forty minutes past the scheduled appointment. Do you need something?"

"Figured I should stop by anyways." A small quirk of the mouth, and a crinkle of his eyes that reminded her of Kakashi.

A bit ill-tempered, she snapped her pen down from where she had been clicking it. "Do you think I have nothing better to do then to wait for you?

"You don't have a patient until eight." The blues of his eyes that reminded her of the sky in days fortelling snow grew brighter as the sun dived into the horizon.

Sakura blinked, sitting up straighter while her mind raced to how, exactly, he had come to know that information.

"How do you know that?" Cautiously and slowly, trademarks of the tortoise.

He shrugged, flaxen hair rough-ragged and tousled, covering the beige of his face. "Oh...I don't know..." He smiled again—her heart fluttered like canary wings in a birdcage facing a window full of freedom—ambiguously. Such an abstruse, sphinxlike creature, she thought.

Sakura watches him closely, pulling at the edge of her desk in a futile attempt not to backtrack five years ago, imagining the adolescent dream, a young girl amongst a rainfall of heartshaped leaves, with a boy who takes her hand and walks her down the burst of colors, while she wavers tragically to keep the professional air of distinction about her.

Deciding that it is a moot point to question him further about the matter, she leans back to study the undecipherable scribbles against her paper.

"I suppose we should start where we left off." She eyed him closely, his relaxed position, a predator watching a prey, a posture of bemusement, a great lion watching a mouse twitter in its paralyzing gaze.

"Alright." He nodded.

"Where did you go once you retired from being a Konohagakure shinobi?"

A pitter-patter of rain against glass panes.

"I told you, a ramen taster."

"Really."

"Quite."

"And where did you go when you were a ramen connoisseur?" She asks, more to humor him then for personal interest.

"Oh you know," A vague motion of his hands, a noncommittal grin. "I get around."

"Huh." She hummed, very, _very _interested.

The rest of the hour carried on in a very similar fashion. While Naruto enjoyed humoring her with his outlandish slapstick comedy stories of his life, many of which she found herself surrounded in the whimsy of his life, reeling herself in before she could fully be ensnared.

Ranging from suicide missions before his fifteenth birthday (those of which she was inclined to believe from Shikamaru's explanation of his life) to running from a rather prominent daimyo for stealing unique pepper from his kitchen, rescuing princesses as a dashing young prince, many of which she felt he had 'burrowed' from classic fairytales.

For example, his explanation of falling down the rabbit hole.

"Didn't happen like I thought it would." He mused, watching her flowers. "One minute, I was carrying groceries, next, I end up falling down, down, down..."

"Chasing a rabbit, I presume?" She chuckled dashingly.

"No, no." He smirked. "A fox. And into the abyss I went—

"Falling down a tunnel with shelves of books?"

"No, down a long pipe and into a wet sewer."

"I see."

"Inside, I was swept into a pool of tears from the sewage that flooded the jail—

"Its a jail now? There was a jail in wonderland?"

"It's not wonderland," He teased. And then, a flicker of his eyes, something behind them she wanted to identify as guilt. Guilt for lying to her?

"Then?"

Softly, he smiled. "Oh, its a room with a cage. We could call it Cageland."

Sakura suppressed a giggle. "You—

The watch on her unfurnished desk struck its hour with an air of finality. She closed her mouth abruptly. Remembering her head, and coolly stopping such dreamy nonsense. He was a patient, for god sakes, not a storyteller from the fantasy books of her youth, fabricating such gelastic worlds only accessed under starry nights with open, young minds.

"Wednesday," She called, as she picked up her files. "Try not to be late." Her voice, crisp and silverbell, yet frosted.

With a mock salute, he walked out the door, and Sakura placed a finger to the buzzing clock on her desk.

* * *

_guess the song?_


End file.
